Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

v11n

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2018
14
0
Hey everyone,

First of all, I have posted and asked for help on apple discussions but it has been more than 48 hours and no one replied. If someone here can help me I promise I will include the solutions on the apple discussions post and link to this thread.

UPDATE: This might be solved soon, since I have gotten a response on the apple discussion thread. I will update this thread once I solved my problems. In retrospect, sorry for my impatience and the crosspost.

I have also found this thread on macrumors which basically describes the same problem. The difference is that his problem evolved after a failed frozen partitioning resizing process and I have done no such thing.

I have tried to understand a little more about the fdisks and gdisks outputs meaning but I could still use a little help. I am smart with computers but I have never really got my head around partitioning tables, sectors etc.

What happened in a nutshell:

1. I created a second 60GB partition for Windows 7 with Bootcamp
2. I used this method with virtualbox to install windows on the Bootcamp partition.
Note: Windows created another 100MB "System Reserved" partition which might be the origin of my problem.
3. I shut down virtualbox and tried to boot my macbook into windows with alt/options key but there was no other OS or partition to chose.
4. Back in MacOS I noticed the partition thats 60GB is now called System Reserved and the Bootcamp partition disappeared.

What I would like to do is recover the Bootcamp partition and make it bootable.

However, I think the first step would be understanding why it disappeared and why the System Reserved partition has taken its place and is now 60GB instead of 100MB.

Has anyone got an idea?

I dont know the right words to say this properly but I am assuming a partition can't just disappear and be replaced by another. I guess that partitions somehow cant be read and interpreted by any command like diskutil gdisk etc. and that the bootcamp partition is still where it used to be (disk0s3).

This is why I am hesitant to reformat the current disk0s3 System Reserved partition and start the windows intstallation all over again. I think that would mess up things completely won't it?


[doublepost=1544147602][/doublepost]These are my terminal outputs

Code:
sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=500107862016; sectorsize=512; blocks=976773168
gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1
gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 976773167
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         MBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6  
         40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640  857421888      2  GPT part - 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  857831528       1944  
  857833472  118939648      3  GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
  976773120         15  
  976773135         32         Sec GPT table
  976773167          1         Sec GPT header

Code:
sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0   geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: EE 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -     409639] <Unknown ID>
 2: FF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [    409640 -  857421888] Xenix BBT
 3: 0B 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 857833472 -  118939648] Win95 FAT-32
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused

Code:
sudo gdisk -l /dev/disk0

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.4

Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan:
  MBR: hybrid
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with hybrid MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/disk0: 976773168 sectors, 465.8 GiB
Sector size (logical): 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 6DEBDAF3-548A-4F2D-AE58-D4FBDE562F80
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773134
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 1965 sectors (982.5 KiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1              40          409639   200.0 MiB   EF00  EFI System Partition
   2          409640       857831527   408.9 GiB   AF0A  Mac OS X SSD
   3       857833472       976773119   56.7 GiB    0700
[doublepost=1544147959][/doublepost]
Code:
diskutil list

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         439.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data System Reserved         60.9 GB    disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +439.0 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Mac OS X SSD            185.1 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 22.2 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                512.1 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      4.3 GB     disk1s4
 
Last edited:

v11n

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2018
14
0
For those having similar problems as me.

I still do not know why the System Reserved partition did "overwrite" the Bootcamp partition.
In the end it did not matter. I just formatted the partition again and install windows again. During the next installations windows did not create a System Reserved partition anymore. But that did not solve all my problems yet. Windows was still not bootable and I couldn't find a way to fix it apart from starting all over again with another more comprehensive install guide:

Installing Windows 7 or 10 Pro 64 bit without DVD or Flash Drive.

This guide worked perfectly for me.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.